Generally, harvesting fruit such as oranges or apples and many other types of fruits requires a person either to climb a ladder to remove the fruit or to use an apparatus to remove the fruit. Conventionally an apparatus of this type has an elongate handle which allows the operator to raise an end to the fruit and pick the fruit from the tree. Some examples of this type include U.S. Pat. No. 5,083,418 (Reece), U.S. Pat. No. 3,638,409 (Kuska), U.S. Pat. No. 4,471,604 (Soffer), U.S. Pat. No. 5,787,698 (Rushing), U.S. Pat. No. 4,959,949 (Weir) and U.S. Pat. No. 5,249,412 (Morgan). The above U.S. patents utilise an elongate handle generally in the form of a pole and to catch the fruit after the fruit has been picked. A problem with the above U.S. patents is that there is a potential to damage the fruit through the lateral movement of the entire apparatus and there is no support of the branch in which the fruit is located which makes pulling the fruit from the tree sometimes difficult.
Some other examples of fruit harvesters include U.S. Pat. No. 4,388,798 (Gerber) that has a vacuum at an end of an elongate tube which utilises the suction from the vacuum to remove the fruit from the tree. There is a potential for damage to the fruit through the suction, the apparatus has a large and awkward vacuum which has to be moved around the field, different sizes of fruit cannot be pulled through the tube and different degrees of ripeness of the fruit make a stronger vacuum a necessity for ensured removal of the fruit.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,854,273 (Rosenberg) and U.S. Pat. 5,280,697 (Miller) utilise a cutter bar for removing the fruit from the tree which potentially can damage the fruit since the cutter bar may puncture the fruit.